A bright fireball lit up the skies above Northern Mexico and the South-western United States on February 8, 1969. After break-up in the atmosphere, more than 2 tonnes (tons) of meteorites rained down over the Mexican state Chihuahua. Some meteorites were large enough to create impact pits, some as large as 60 cm across and 15 cm deep. The meteorite shower had a good timing, just before NASA’s Apollo program was set to deliver moon rocks to Earth. Many laboratories were being upgraded to handle the lunar samples and were immediately ready to study the freshly recovered meteorites. The Allende meteorite is a carbonaceous chondrite, type CV3. Allende is a widely studied meteorite due to the large availability of material. This model was created for the Utrecht Meteorite Lab, a new virtual meteorite collection under development at Utrecht University.
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